🤯 Crazy to see these big agencies winning all these industry awards after seeing the work on their clients. They win an award and their clients are speaking to me about an audit 🙈 For one of the winners of the category of 𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐤𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐠𝐲 - here's my audit summary ~85% of the budget is spent on automated campaigns - Budget close to half a mil a month 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐨𝐧 𝐠𝐮𝐲𝐬... We can do better. Award hosts. Judges. We can do better. And $3K+ for an award?!? AND the clients got one foot out the door 🤷♂️ Broken. #agencylife #agency #marketing
Jackie They
2mo
Awards are partly a PR, client engagement and talent retention business, and the agencies use them to engage senior leaders and get new businesses.
Agreed 100%. The challenges of small and medium agencies are real—limited resources, tight budgets, scaling difficulties, client retention struggles, access to cutting-edge tech, and brand perception issues all make it tough to compete with the bigger players.
Jyot Patel
2mo
Unfortunately....that's how the advertising industry has been operating... 🤐. There are some awards, which openly tell that they are only for the PR purpose, and I like them better because at least they made themselves clear so we can judge accordingly and not get misguided.
Funny how awards and client feedback don’t always match up
Jignesh Gohel
1mo
Valid point
Tristan Yau
2mo
Robert L. That’s just the nature of agencies business, be it creative or media. Most clients really have no clue how to audit or even evaluate the performance of their budgets spent but yet they sign off on strange campaign proposals 😂
Nikita B.
2mo
Lots of awards are paid 😄
head of marketing @ BLOCK71 | doctoral student @ SUSS | career mentor to undergrads | ex-Grab, foodpanda, Singapore Tourism Board
2moRobert L. i was recently the judge of a big one and ... i don't know...many entries were reporting increase in impressions by X% as the reason why their campaigns deserve medals. a handful focused on commercial metrics like revenue and for those i naturally gave many more points. in line with your reply to Jackie They asking is this the best the industry can offer? yea...you know i know. in a separate tangent, that judging experience made me think about the idea of 'awards access' i.e. only those with resources can play this game of thrones. SMEs and startups are shut out. but it absolutely doesn't mean they don't do awesome work. but i'm curious: how do you actually audit these campaigns? where do you get their budget breakdown? 🤭